I think the people who use Perl::Critic see some value in it. They've already answered this question of why. Among them, if they find that this particular policy stifles their creativity or fails to add value, they can turn it off either globally or for special occasions. For the ones who want it, I want to make it for them the best that I can.

(As an aside, I wonder if you would say the same thing of a large subroutine. Say it has too many lines or too many levels of indention, or what-have-you. Is there any gain to chunking it out to multiple subroutines (as an analog to moving parts of the regexp into variables and constructing the whole from parts)? Is it worth formatting it and commenting it?)

In reply to Re^2: Assessing the complexity of regular expressions by kyle
in thread Assessing the complexity of regular expressions by kyle

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.